kishy's 1984 Town Car

[kishy]

Dragging my heels here, evidently.

As above, heater core and plenum assembly came out of the car.
I replaced the two problem hinges. Vacuum checked that everything moves correctly.
Scraped off the disintegrating foam and cleaned things out reasonably.
Reassembled the halves of the plenum. Used some RTV along the seam that the factory had used butyl for. Used bolts where the factory had used rivets - just being mindful of how destructive getting the rivets out is, in case I have to go in here again sometime.
Heater core went in. Had to trim the foam thing as it didn't fit quite right. I feel like that happened with the wagon as well.
I put the whole thing back in the car, hooked it up with some new heater hose.
Unfortunately, the tee to send coolant through the EGR spacer crumbled, so I capped off the EGR cooler outlet hose for now.
Ran the engine (with dash still on floor) for a good long while, made sure it gets properly hot, all the doors move properly, and there seems to be no leakage inside the plenum.
I think the dash is just about ready to go back together now.







As for the dash cam wiring, I found one of the hardwire devices (handles the transition from regular recording to parking mode, and low battery shut-off), and identified good options for fuses to use in the fuse panel for "add-a-circuit" type fuse taps. The wiring is tucked in the trim above the windshield, I still have to route it through the dash when that gets reinstalled.

I made some alterations to the headlamp buckets in preparation for LED headlights, but I ran into an issue, that being the heat sinking on the new lamps wants to poke too far back not only for the bucket, but the header panel itself. It looks like I could clearance the fiberglass to make it work.

This car has pretty catastrophic rust in the right side A-pillar area, by the upper door hinge. I know this is a common spot on these cars but I can't say that I really understand where the water comes from that causes it. It looks like it starts from the inside, and probably from water that is somehow running down inside the pillar itself. Sort of wondering if a vinyl top sealing defect is maybe the origin of this problem - if not it's probably a hole somewhere around the windshield butyl.





Replaced the TV bushing. Found a couple of the "aftermarket" ones I've collected from junkyard cars are thinner and work better for CFI than the actual Ford items.



I finally could put my hands on the emblems and the little mounting clip things for the fender Town Car emblems, which have been missing since it had the front bodywork painted years ago.
While I was at it, I put a Town Car emblem in the spot normally occupied by a Continental emblem on the left headlamp door.
For what it's worth, I had collected the retainers from junkyard cars, but I think this is them: https://www.amazon.ca/Retro-Motive-E.../dp/B07F5VTCMK
Oddly, those (when in stock which they aren't right now) ship from the US, but US Amazon doesn't list them at all.
There are a couple varieties of visibly identical in a photo, but differently sized ones. The Town Car emblems have a 1/8" stud.
The original Ford retainers have a rubber ring moulded onto the outer end of the retainer which spaces the emblem off the paint somewhat.

[gadget73]

I think the water runs down the windshield and ends up running down inside the A pillars. The rot forms where the metal pieces overlap and get welded together. Water gets into that joint and just sits there. Not uncommon to see rust streaks down the hinge bolts too.

[kishy]

The other day, I wrestled the dash back into position, making the car back together enough that it could be driven. The dash pad remains off at the moment as I'm pretty sure the ATC interior temperature sensor is problematic in this car (but maybe I'm thinking of the wagon) so I may want to poke around with that before fully closing it up. Aside from some air I'm having difficulty bleeding, the heater core job is done and it works well. I even tried filling the system through the heater core, but I think a high spot in the other hose continues to trap some air. Not a big deal, but it is making the waterfall noises typical of trapped air.



The dashcam hardwire kit has been routed through the dash and given the constant and switched power sources it wants. I'm now fighting with the dash cam itself (and its identical twin from the wagon) to get the settings set how I want.







One casualty of the heater core job was the hood release knob. Dash fell on it, broke it off. Today, I drilled a hole in the metal portion of it, tapped it, and screwed (+super glue) the knob back on the end of the cable. Works great.







I located the problem with the Air Lift bag that wouldn't take pressure. Broken line. Easy enough, fixed that.





While under there, I noticed the license plate still has a stack of expired stickers on it. Ontario got rid of license plate stickers so this is fairly common, but I like to remove them, so I did that. I also used nicer looking stainless hardware to put the plate back on.



I took a look at the exhaust hangers. The four hangers (behind each muffler and at each tailpipe exit) are all Walker universal parts and the rubber strap portion of each is looking really rough. They haven't aged well at all. I still have more of the same garbage hangers new on the shelf so I may swap them before they fail.

Went to grease the U-joints but found that it doesn't have greasable ones. Apparently I've never changed them on this car. Interesting. Probably not going to mess with those until/unless they get noisy or sloppy.

There's a noise from the rear end of the car cruising at road speed. It's sort of a rhythmic sound, seems to pulse with vehicle speed. Not sure how to describe the sound. Definitely not a squeak, maybe sort of a growl or muted grinding. But as I recall it didn't change when I put new axle bearings on this a while back. Some sort of drum brake nonsense, maybe.

I have de-fogged the H4 headlamp housings. They aren't airtight/watertight and over time they picked up some condensation which made them a little cloudy. I wiped them out with paper towels dampened with isopropyl alcohol and it seems to have worked well. If the road trip does occur, and this car is the car for it, I want decent headlamps. The H4s are good enough if I don't get the LED option to work in time (re: fitment), but obviously only with clean lenses.



I drove the car a little bit tonight and it drives well. The brakes don't feel like they bite very well, needing more pedal force than what the 95-97 brakes have set as my expectations in the wagon, however this car did get secondhand pads and rotors so of course it isn't going to perform like new-new. The drum brake lock-grabbiness that I remembered from the past is not occurring with this car anymore so I almost wonder if a master cylinder defect had something to do with it.

I did a little poking around with the inoperative temperature gauge in the cluster.
The fuel gauge works, so we know the instrument voltage regulator works.
A test light hooked to the end of the temp gauge sender wire dimly blinks, which tells me there is no break in the wire back to the cluster.
A multimeter from the sender to ground (oops, manual says not to do that) finds a plausible number of ohms for a hot engine (86) and a plausible number of ohms for an engine that has sat cooling off for a while (100), with resistance increasing the longer it cools.
I swapped the gauge out of my parts cluster and nothing changed.
As best I can tell, everything here works, so I'm not really sure where to go next with it. I'm certain I swapped the sender in the past in pursuit of this too, but maybe I should dig around and see if I've got a new one somewhere.
The gauge does rise off its minimum position to point at the Cold mark, but it doesn't climb past that.
vs the original symptom when I got the car of the gauge gradually climbing to its maximum position.

edit: I just realized what's wrong here. The book says the range is 73 ohms (cold) to 10 ohms (hot), so a normal running temp engine is somewhere in the middle of that. Mid 30s perhaps. What I said above about 86 ohms and 100 ohms is clearly wrong and is also clearly what the problem is. The sender is "working" in that the resistance is changing in the correct direction, but it's off the chart for correct values. A sender should fix the problem.

[gadget73]

once again the EVTM saves the day. Having decent documentation available makes fixing anything so much easier.

[WagonMan]

Kevin, I have an extra hood release if you need one. Pete